Wow. That's a wonderful essay, and a kind of stunning failure on Wrede's part. Made so very much worse by her offhand "the threat of Indians was replaced by the threat of un-extinct megafauna"—in other words, not only is erasing Native Americans a sensible thing to do, but it's sensible because they're only important in the way they interact with Europeans, and to that end they're completely interchangeable with other things. Indians, wild dragons, it's all the same.

That...words really start to fail me.